Here Are the Happiest and Saddest Places to Live in the UK

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

There's one of those surveys doing the rounds from Rightmove—you know, Rightmove, estate agents busted down from their corporeal flesh-and-gak forms and vaporized into the shape of a website, Rightmove no better than estate agents just because it is composed of CSS and Java queries, estate agents still really just the same old rats you wouldn't save from a fire—anyway, there's one of those surveys doing the rounds saying where the happiest place to live in Britain is.

It's Harrogate. For the third time in a row, the smuggest row of all time.

The top line is Harrogate is a spa town in Yorkshire, north of the Leeds-Barnsley-Wakefield axis known as the Ey Up Triangle, home to about 75,000 people and a famous tea house called Betty's Tea House. It's also, according to this anonymous ilivehere review, home to "chavs" who fill the clubs with their "chav sweat" and sully the streets with their "hepatitis tainted chav piss"." So it's hard to know if Harrogate is nice, isn't it? Who to trust: a survey of 24,000 people about where they live, or one anonymous commenter who really likes the word "chav" but hates actual so-called chavs? Tricky. But for balance let's go with the chav-hater.

Second to Harrogate is Shrewsbury. Third is Ipswich. York and Chester round out the top five. Inverness and Llandrindod Wells were the "shit, best throw some Scottish and Welsh places into the mix" entries as sixth and seventh, and Hemel Hempstead was the only vaguely southern entry at eighth. The Top 10 extremely shitty places to live list was mainly just bits of London: Barking and Dagenham, then Hounslow, Brent, and Harrow, then Newham, then popular cereal café and Russell Brand outlet Tower Hamlets, then Greenwich. Luton was in there, too. So the overwhelming evidence from a Rightmove survey of 24,000 people is: north good, south bad, London very bad.

The surprising thing of course is that London boroughs were ranked among the 10 least happy areas to live, because how can people be unhappy in London, home to the country's media? Are you really telling me people are happier in Harrogate? Does Harrogate have a towering skyscraper shaped like a shark's penis, and Boris Johnson as mayor? Can you buy salted caramel or pulled pork in Harrogate? In London, that is all you can buy. Does Harrogate have diseased pigeons and an archaic transport system? Does Harrogate have £5 [$8] pints? A broken property ladder? Gun crime? Call us, Harrogate, when you've invented a music genre that can compete with grime. Then, maybe, we will talk.

Or maybe, we should bring the grime to you. With London dying from the inside—its skeleton poisoned, its identity torn to shreds, London essentially now Darth Vader halfway through that bit where robots rebuild him, Russian oligarchs bolting on new limbs and penthouses, slowly scraping his humanity out with lasers, R2-D2 weeping in a corner—why don't we all move to Harrogate, ah? It's happy. It's got a tea room. We can build some high rise flats on the outskirts and commute in. Run a few extra buses. Tear some old spa buildings down for metro rail stations. Have a free newspaper that everyone leaves on the pavement. Put neon lights on everything. Ram the house prices up a bit, just to track the market. Have a Shoreditch bit, for VICE to build offices in. Stab and shoot each other more. Turn it into a city, with a fucking heart.

Then will we be happy? We will not. I'm slowly starting to believe that the human condition does not default to happiness, and that actually happiness is a high achievement, like winning an Olympic sprint, or buying clothes online and them fitting first time. Maybe we should stop getting hung up on who is happy and who isn't and maybe just admit that, based on a 12-criteria survey of 24,000 people by fucking Rightmove, some happier to be living in Harrogate than not. Some people living in Harrogate are probably in a pit of despair right now. Someone in Barking probably just delightedly jizzed. Some bits of Harrogate are hepatitis-tainted "chav" piss puddles, apparently, and some bits are really nice. Some parts of Dagenham are alright, some are on fire.

The waxing and the waning of the tides, the movement of the sun and the moons, the charring of the bloated estate agent corpses on the beach, the constant flux-like exchange of happiness from one person and away from another: that's what keeps this planet going, not Rightmove surveys. Live wherever the shit you want. Be as happy as you can muster. Kill as many estate agents as it is possible to kill on your path into hell.

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